Byron eBook

had agreed to assume her family name). The announcement
of her marriage, which took place in August, 1805,
was made to him by his mother, with the remark, “I
have some news for you. Take out your handkerchief;
you will require it.” On hearing what she
had to say, with forced calm he turned the conversation
to other subjects; but he was long haunted by a loss
which he has made the theme of many of his verses.
In 1807 he sent to the lady herself the lines beginning,—­

O had my fate been join’d with thine.

In the following year he accepted an invitation to
dine at Annesley, and was visibly affected by the
sight of the infant daughter of Mrs. Chaworth, to
whom he addressed a touching congratulation. Shortly
afterwards, when about to leave England for the first
time, he finally addressed her in the stanzas,—­

’Tis done, and shivering in the
gale,
The bark unfurls her snowy sail.

Some years later, having an opportunity of revisiting
the family of his successful rival, Mrs. Leigh dissuaded
him. “Don’t go,” she said, “for
if you do you will certainly fall in love again, and
there will be a scene.” The romance of
the story culminates in the famous Dream, a
poem of unequal merit, but containing passages of
real pathos, written in the year 1816 at Diodati,
as we are told, amid a flood of tears.

Miss Chaworth’s attractions, beyond those of
personal beauty, seem to have been mainly due—­a
common occurrence—­to the poet’s imagination.
A young lady, two years his senior, of a lively and
volatile temper, she enjoyed the stolen interviews
at the gate between the grounds, and laughed at the
ardent letters, passed through a confidant, of the
still awkward youth whom she regarded as a boy.
She had no intuition to divine the presence, or appreciate
the worship, of one of the future master-minds of England,
nor any ambition to ally herself with the wild race
of Newstead, and preferred her hale, commonplace,
fox-hunting squire. “She was the beau ideal,”
says Byron, in his first accurate prose account of
the affair, written 1823, a few days before his departure
for Greece, “of all that my youthful fancy could
paint of beautiful. And I have taken all my fables
about the celestial nature of women from the perfection
my imagination created in her. I say created;
for I found her, like the rest of the sex, anything
but angelic.”

Mrs. Musters (her husband re-asserted his right to
his own name) had in the long-run reason to regret
her choice. The ill-assorted pair after some
unhappy years resolved on separation; and falling into
bad health and worse spirits, the “bright morning
star of Annesley” passed under a cloud of mental
darkness. She died, in 1832, of fright caused
by a Nottingham riot. On the decease of Musters,
in 1850, every relic of her ancient family was sold
by auction and scattered to the winds.